Colleges cozy up to social media

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter increasingly used to reach out to Generation Text.

August 15, 2010|By Margie Peterson | Special to The Morning Call

When Heidi Butler first started using the social networking technology Twitter in her job as Northampton Community College spokeswoman, she was slightly unnerved whenever she got a message that a new person had signed up to 'follow' her.

That was a year ago — a lifetime in the world of new media — and now she tweets about happenings at NCC to 409 "followers" as if communicating in 140 characters or less were her first language; her staff calls her the Twitter Queen.

Colleges around the Lehigh Valley are increasingly embracing social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as valuable ways to communicate with students, potential students and the community. Schools typically have more than one Facebook page with offices for financial aid, admissions and alumni, for example, maintaining their own.

For some area schools, such as Lafayette College in Easton, the emphasis is on recruiting new students through a medium they're comfortable with. "Our number one objective is to give prospective students a taste of what Lafayette is like, what our character is," said Dave Block, associate director of Web content and social media for the college.

Others, such as Muhlenberg College in Allentown, employ it more as a "big community bulletin board," according to Bill Keller, Muhlenberg's new media specialist.

"We have taken an approach where we do not actively recruit students through our social networks," Keller said.

Most colleges fall somewhere in between, posting on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to keep their communities informed of events, new programs and faculty and student achievements, while hoping potential students logging on decide their campuses sound like great places to be.

Not surprisingly, they don't need to look far for experts in new media.

When NCC decided it needed a Facebook page in 2007, it turned to one of those people for whom new media is like mother's milk — a member of Generation Text.

"We were coached through that by an NCC student," Butler said of former student Brandy Barbera. "The student really was our teacher."

When Lehigh University in Bethlehem was setting up its first Facebook page, alumni advised staff to remember Facebook is interactive and not a one-way street for dishing out information, according to Lehigh spokeswoman Jennifer Tucker. "They said, 'Don't just tell us what you're doing but ask us what we think of that,' " she recalled.

The media specialists said they're conscious of being their colleges' institutional voice while still trying to be informal and engaging online.

NCC staff writers Katherine Noll and Cynthia Tintorri are two of the voices for the college's nerdy mascot, Sam Spartan, who has really blossomed since getting his own Facebook page. Tintorri said sometimes before Noll posts an item on Sam Spartan's page, she will "come over to my office and say, 'Should Sam say … ?"

At times Sam's page is a conduit for hashing out campus issues.

"We've had some lively debates on there in regard to the smoking policy on the college campus," Noll said.

Events, such as a snowstorm or a big game, often drive up the number of "views" a college's Facebook page or website receives. When Lehigh University's men's basketball team advanced to the NCAA tournament in March, traffic on its website, mobile website and Facebook page went through the roof, Tucker said.

In this age of information overload, media specialists are acutely aware of the need to keep their Facebook pages and other social media fresh without posting so much that inundated viewers turn off and tune out.

"It's definitely a concern to provide information but not to overwhelm students," Tucker said.

Muhlenberg's Keller agreed. "I try to keep a mental note not to put out too much information in a day," he said.

Some schools are turning to YouTube to give students and potential students a taste of campus life.

DeSales University in Center Valley switched its videos from its website to a YouTube channel and has seen the number of views increase 300 percent since January 2009, according to Kristin Greenberg, DeSales' Web content coordinator. The college posts clips ranging from athletic events to campus performances to shorts on service projects abroad.

Lehigh's videos have had 8,467 views since it started posting them on its own Lehigh YouTube channel. NCC started posting videos on You Tube in November 2008 and has had more than 46,000 views to date.

The social medium getting mixed reviews from colleges is Twitter. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last month on a study that found few prospective students are interested in getting "tweets" from colleges. Researchers said that while 40 percent of admissions offices use Twitter, only 15 percent of potential students said they wanted to hear about colleges that way.

That appears to be true for students already enrolled at DeSales, Greenberg said. "Not too many students seem to use Twitter," she said. "I think they kind of get from Facebook what Twitter would give them." And although Butler uses Twitter at Northampton Community College, she hasn't found it to be the best way to communicate with students.

Lafayette's Block said that fewer than 200 people follow him on Twitter but it's not much extra work to send messages that way. "Although the Twitter following is smaller, most of the followers are pretty enthusiastic," he said.

Trying to keep up with the ever-changing trends in new media is enough to give college staffs whiplash. Not long ago MySpace was the hot social networking site before the volcanic shift to Facebook. "That's the thing about social media, it changes so fast," Greenberg said.